Word: brechtian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Mies was a man with his share of contradictions. All his life he combined the bearing and wardrobe of a bourgeois with a merciless intellectual radicalism. This may be why, with his constant cigar, he could look at times like Mephistopheles in a Brechtian update of Faust. Like Wright, he also sustained a 19th century romantic notion of himself as an artist, a man answerable only to his own instincts. (After just a few years of marriage in the 1920s, his hapless wife Ada decided to stop resisting his regular infidelities and move out.) Mies insisted that the architect must...
...makes a living as an arcade attraction playing Abraham Lincoln; patrons pay to impersonate John Wilkes Booth, grab a pistol and shoot him. (The image simply "burned itself into my mind," she explains.) Her spiky plays often take place in a strange nowheresville and feature Greek-style choruses or Brechtian song interludes. For one play, F------ A (Parks doesn't use the dashes), she invented a new language that some characters use when they talk about sex. In Venus, her epic on the life of the Hottentot Venus, a 19th century African woman displayed as a freak because...
...beyond casting. For a school that lacks a full drama department, Harvard has a sizable number of legitimately talented theater practicioners. But rare is the actor or director who is willing to reach outside of the realist tradition into some of the other realms of dramatic presentation--true Brechtian "presentational" drama, Mamet's recitational method of acting or Artaud's theater of cruelty. Sure, most of the plays on campus aren't set in a suburban kitchen, but they are more often populated by characters than by what critics might call figures, personas or representations...
...Hollow Lands, having its premiere at the South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, Calif., is not your garden-variety revisionist history. Bleak and Brechtian in style, it has no overt political message; no easy, retroactive moralizing about the sins of our ancestors. Achieving the nation's "Manifest Destiny," it implies, was not a great quest or a great crime but a kind of communal neurosis, a manic need to chart the uncharted--an endeavor people in the play are constantly, fuzzily describing as "freedom." Yet those great white spaces of terra incognita on the map are being filled in faster...
...heart of the movie is a dramatization of the real-life events behind the renegade production of the 1936 musical play "The Cradle Will Rock," a Brechtian compilation of songs that depicts the workers of Steeltown, USA standing up the Man. Robbins treats the show as an important cultural moment in which the political and cultural tensions of the decade finally bolted to the surface. The facts of the story are all true and fascinating. Blitzstein, played with suitable gusto by Hank Azaria, wrote the words and music for Cradle in a rush of inspiration, fed up with various forms...